Hospitals and Sign Language

Dobré!
This has been a surprisingly great week. Last week I had some pain in my ear and I went to the hospital with one of the members and her son, Gabriel (Gabko). Gabko has ear problems like me and so they completely understood the necessity of getting this checked out asap. Elder Nichol went with me while Bacon stayed behind on exchanges with the District leader. unfortunatly, Gabko's doctor wouldn't look at me as I was an adult. So Nichol and I went off to the Stary Nemonica to find one that would. We quickly leanred that when you need to go to the Dr. you just show up by their office. No check-in, no form to fill out my health history, nič! When the Dr. is free his nurse pokes her head and accpets the next person in line. They check out my Visa and get to work. The Dr. got really annoyed that we couldn't really speak Slovak and that he couldn't see in my ear. He tries to blast the excess wax with a large syringe, something that I've had done before-very painful. Elder Nichol was pretty traumatized by the experience and couldn't watch. He did that a couple times and had no luck. So he gave me a tube of peroxide and directions to put that in twice a day and come back on Thursday. We "recovered" back at the apartment for a couple hours. Both of us were getting pretty sick. Cough, fever, the works. Bacon and Nichol would make fun of me when I put the peroxide in. I couldn't hear a thing with that stuff in. Went back on Thursday and success! He was able to clear out the wax through the same, painful process. My ears still hurt and so he stuffed a strip of gauze that was soaked in vinegar inside my ear and told me to leave that for 3 hours and if I still had trouble go to a doctor in another part of town. I couldn't hear anything as it was in my good ear, so we just kind of sat around for 3 hours waiting. Luckily my ears did stop hurting and I didn't need to go. No infection! And at Specialized Training Sister Irwin gave me some good medicine that got rid of whatever I had. But despite all the time we spent going to the hospital and staying in for sick missionaries we had a very good week and looking at our numbers, it was no different from the average week. Goes to show that when you work with what you got, you can still achieve what you set out to achieve. :)
I finally meet Šaňo, our deaf member. He is really only active if there is a missionary who can interpret for him. I met him at game night and he had a lot of fun playing Uno. The next day at Church he showed up for priesthood and I did my best to interpret. luckily, the lesson was taught in English as we only had one native Slovak there. (We just changed clocks for daylight savings so we are blaming that for no one being at church) I still got my sign language skills, but man, it's RUSTY. And I know zero church vocabulary. But he understood pretty well and as time went on I felt more comfortable. I'm glad to have met him finally, and I hope he comes more often to church!
Our investigators are doing fine, progressing as best they can. Bratislava has a baptism on Saturday! Gabriel moved up his date a week as he would be out of town next week. We get to watch General Conference next week (they get the dvds of conference dubbed in Slovak a week after) so Gabriel's baptism will be a nice way to get ready for it.

That's all I got for you now.
peace from the east,
Starsi Williams